My life as an out gay person in Russia

Since Russia imposed draconian new laws banning 'homosexual propaganda', hostility and homophobic attacks have increased. So what is life like for a writer who lives with her girlfriend and their three children?

Masha Gessen: 'The Kremlin’s Nashi youth movement spread the news that I personally was out to destroy the Orthodox family. An online community calling for my murder appeared.' Photograph: Max Sher for the Guardian

We tell our stories to know who we are and to tell each other that we are not alone. Our stories bear the traces of other stories we heard about ourselves. I remember my first ones. As a pre-teen, I read the Penal Code of the USSR, which said that the crime of "man lying with man" was punishable by up to five years in prison. I was not a man, but I had been having fantasies about being one and kissing a woman, a friend of my mother's. Somehow, my 12-year-old brain made the connection and I knew two things: I was not alone, and I was a criminal. A year or so later, this was confirmed when I heard that a famous theatre director was facing prosecution for having sex with a young man. A friend from Leningrad recalls reading, at the age of 16, a textbook on sexual pathology. It suggested treating the female homosexual with thorazine, an early anti-psychotic medication with long-lasting, debilitating side-effects.

That friend left Leningrad and made a new, thorazine-free story for herself in the United States. I also emigrated, with my parents, as a teenager in 1981, and I did not return to the Soviet Union until 10 years later. In 1993, the sodomy law was quietly repealed, thorazine was, as far as I could tell, retired around the same time, and Russian queers got to the slow work of building identities and communities. For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.

By the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff. Our stories didn't make it on to the pages of mainstream magazines or newspapers, but at least they were quietly being told. A famous singer and a well-known actress, both women, fell in love and began working and living together; their relationship was an open secret, the talk of Moscow's largely approving high society. They would not acknowledge it publicly, though.

Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion. Issues such as same-sex marriage or protection from discrimination were not on the table, but then again, Russia was rebuilding itself as a dictatorship, so the political table had been hijacked.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, was telling itself and the world a very different story about Russia. Very few of us realised just how different it was; I certainly did not. Russia was stumbling on its way to becoming the "family values" capital of the world. The country, it felt, was being besieged by enemies who aimed to destroy its traditions and social institutions. LGBT people were the country's biggest threat: the quintessential "foreign agent", the ultimate other. In 2006, legislation banning "homosexual propaganda" – enshrining in law second-class citizenship for non-heterosexuals, making it an offence to claim equality – started winding its way from the smallest Russian cities to the largest. In June of this year, it became federal law.

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has called the international trend toward legalising same-sex marriage "a sign of the coming apocalypse". A popular conservative pundit recorded a series of commentaries for state-owned Channel 1, portraying LGBT people as the antichrist. The Kremlin's Nashi youth movement spread the news that I personally was out to destroy the Orthodox family. An online community calling for my murder appeared.

What scared me a lot more, however, was the promise, made by several prominent politicians, to start removing children from same-sex families. My partner and I and our three children are now leaving Russia. Thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of other LGBT people, are also looking for a way out of the country. The time when we felt our story was just a decade or two behind that of gays and lesbians in western Europe or the US seems impossibly distant now.

What has happened in Russia has captured the world's, which is to say the western media's, imagination. This is surely attributable, at least in part, to the fact that Russians are white. The TV commentator who has been preaching that LGBT people are "creatures who have declared open war on [Russian society] and want to enslave us" would, in his well-cut suits and with his hipster beard, hardly stand out in a London or New York crowd. The politician who drove the anti-gay campaign in St Petersburg and who told a leading Russian daily that "Americans just want to adopt our orphans and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's", can say all of this in fluent, articulate English.

But there is something else, too, that has driven the international reaction of unprecedented solidarity and support for Russia's besieged queers: it is the spectacle of history shifting abruptly into reverse. The current generation of Russians, though few of them are publicly out, had constructed comfortable lives in which they were open to their social circles. When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in. That makes the tragedy of Russian LGBT people easy for western gays to identify with. This could be their story, too.

Look at the world map on the website of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. Same-sex relationships, both male and female, are still against the law in most of Africa and much of Asia. There are more countries in the world that send people to jail for loving someone of the same sex than there are countries that recognise same-sex marriage. In many countries, male same-sex relationships are punishable by 10 years behind bars; in at least two, the penalty is death.

The interviews in the interactive with people from across the world are their stories, too. I hope that they read Israeli activist Yoav Arad Pinkas's words of warning about the way that Israel is growing increasingly conservative and, in his opinion, potentially dangerous for LGBT people, and realise that history can turn back even in a country perceived as a gay haven. But more than that, I also hope that a young person from Egypt, or Afghanistan, or South Africa knows that these stories – some of which are also of love, happiness, and security – are his stories, too. He is not a criminal, and he is not alone.